Google+ Suddenly Looks Pretty Busy for a Ghost Town

Google+ is opening up. The service that the enthusiastic and curious once begged to join is now open to anyone with a Google account, except those unfortunate Apps users (what’s up with that?). Users new and old also get to play with plenty of new desktop and mobile toys to remind them what was exciting about G+ in the first place. New APIs even let developers in on the fun.

So what’s new? For starters, Google’s finally adding the biggest and most-requested no-brainer of all: search.

As you can see from the photo, in the search box that once found only other profiles, users can search over “everything” (i.e., the web), “people,” “Google+ posts,” or “Sparks” (the lightweight Google News front end embedded in G+). Results can then be filtered by “most recent” or “Best of.” The algorithm determining “best” search results in G+ is unclear, but it’s likely some combination of best keyword matches, posts by users in your circles, plus +1 upvotes and/or reshares.

As Google+’s added users and entries, it’s accumulated a lot of content, from blog posts to photos and videos. In order to become a meaningful repository for this media, not just an ephemeral stream, it needs to be searchable. Google may have wanted its social product to stand on its own for a while, rather than becoming an easily-bypassed front end for search like iGoogle. Really, though, Google went about as far as they could go with G+ without building in search. It will make G+ much more usable.

Google+’s most attractive eye-candy feature, Hangouts, also gets a lot more powerful. More than half of the new features to the desktop version of G+ concern Hangouts. These include four Hangout “extras” that allow users to share more content than just YouTube videos:

Screen-sharing (exactly what it sounds like);

Named Hangouts, so users can specify with whom they’d like to hang out and/or what they want to talk about;

Sketchpad, which lets users draw/doodle in real-time;

and Google Docs, which lets hangout members collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet or other documents.

What’s notable about these extras? They’re equally conducive to silly goofing off as they are to serious real-time collaboration. You can slowly sketch “I H-8 U” to a friend who’s teasing you, virtually help your son or daughter with homework, or plan your workgroup’s agenda for the day. I don’t know if Google Hangouts are as secure or stable as some professional-grade teleconferencing apps, but they certainly have gained a lot of their features.

Finally, the new generation of Google+ mobile apps will let you participate in Hangouts from your smartphone. So far, only Android 2.3 users (with appropriate cameras and wireless connections, of course) can get in on mobile Hangouts, but Google says an updated iOS app is making its way through Apple’s store and will land soon, too.

This is handy in part because it works much like Apple’s FaceTime (if you’re an iPhone user), but I think it’s generally a good thing that Google is pushing for a continuity of features between its mobile and desktop versions. When Google+ first launched, its mobile and desktop versions seemed quite different from each other, not always in a positive sense, with desktop Hangouts shut out from mobile Huddles and vice versa. Google seems set now on providing a single service across all devices rather than just a single login.

The mobile app is simply much better than it was at launch or even a week ago. Besides Hangouts, the new Android 2.3 app (and forthcoming iOS version) adds most of the missing features from the desktop version, including +mentions (similar to @-mentions on Twitter), the ability to +1 comments (similar to Likes on Facebook), manage local storage, customize notifications, and upload and edit profile pictures — a handy feature to have on a device with a camera attached.

(Note: It’s possible that some of these features, like disk space management, may not be available for the iOS app; Google’s blog post on the matter is ambiguous, and Google didn’t immediately return a request for clarification as to whether there will be full feature parity between Android and iOS.)

The mobile-only features now include almost entirely those that make sense to be mobile-only, from SMS text-message notifications to “Messenger,” which is the “Huddle” standing group text/IM service rechristened, now with photo-sharing. “Huddle” always was a confusing name, suggesting both football and group sex; it shared a trademarked name with an enterprise collaboration startup; plus, it was inevitably confused with “Hangout.” “Messenger” is more generic, but for that reason, doesn’t have quite the same baggage.

Google+ has drifted a bit since those heady days in June when it first came into our lives. In the last month or so, there have been improvements around the margins — hi there, map snippets and mobile post resharing — but there hasn’t been much (besides each other) to keep users coming back to see what’s new.

On Monday, journalism professor Dan Reimold wrote a widely-circulated PBS MediaShift post citing fatigue with social media and calling Google+ “worse than a ghost town“:

Google+ is dead. At worst, in the coming months, it will literally fade away to nothing or exist as Internet plankton. At best, it will be to social networking what Microsoft’s Bing is to online search: perfectly adequate; fun to stumble onto once in awhile; and completely irrelevant to the mainstream web.

To be clear, I do not buy the beta argument anymore. G+ still being in beta is like Broadway’s “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” still being in previews. It has premiered. Months have passed. Audiences have tried it. Critics have weighed in. It is a show — just not a very entertaining one.

In order to keep users coming back, Google+ has to continue offering new experiences. If Google wants it to be more than a show, it has to show its value as a useful, dead-easy tool to collaborate and connect with other people. It doesn’t have to be Facebook, where users while away their time distracting themselves by clicking cows and updating databases.

As a communication application, Google+ can be a multimedia thunderbolt, as useful as Gmail or Maps. Instead of being annoyed by a coworker’s new email or phone call when mobile, you can do a quick hangout, have them show you exactly what they’re worried about, and solve their (or your) problem. There’s a genuine productivity upside to Google+ in a way that there never has been in Facebook or Twitter — which is what makes it still mystifying that the “open beta” is still closed to Google’s paying Apps customers. You know, the ones who most need a productivity and collaboration game-changer.

On the other hand, if Google+ is going to be a show, it has to be the best in town. It has to have better games than Facebook, better goof-off possibilities, more things that users want that Google may not necessarily know how to give them. In short, it needs third-party developers.

To really milk the value out of Hangouts — and it’s clear three months into the field trial that Hangouts is Google+’s killer app — they have to offer even more than what Google can give. Real-time third-party web apps potentially open up the options box. On the Google+ Platform Blog, technical lead Richard Dunn explains how this will work:

Your app behaves like a normal web app, plus it can take part in the real-time conversation with new APIs like synchronization. Now you can create a “shared state” among all instances of your app so that all of your users can be instantly notified of changes made by anyone else. (This is how the YouTube player keeps videos in sync.) And we’ve added our first few multimedia APIs so you can, for example, mute the audio and video feeds of Hangout participants.

Some of the apps leveraging the Hangouts API will likely just lay over some basic software functionality for specific kinds of real-time chat. Dunn gives four examples of uses G+ users have already found for Hangouts: game shows, fantasy football drafts, guitar lessons and writers collaborating with one another. Specialized software to manage something like a fantasy draft is easy for a developer to do, but hard for users to manage themselves.

From that kind of entry-level application, you can imagine a variety of games, structured interactions and a range of other, increasingly sophisticated use cases as Google opens up more of the API. Users’ new ability, through Hangouts On Air, to broadcast these hangouts beyond the ten-person limit for participants creates an audience for these new experiences. “The future of communication is coming,” writes the New York Times’ Jenna Wortham on her Tumblr, “and it might look something like this.”

So in time, Google+ shakes off the dust and feels a lot less like a ghost town and a lot more like the future. That, at least — plus a slim feature differentiation from and advantage over Facebook, for however long they can maintain it — is what Google’s hoping for.

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